Shaw confident in Paris ‘rulebook’

With hours left before the end of the year’s biggest climate change meeting no ‘‘rulebook’’ for following the Paris accords had been agreed to.

But New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw was confident yesterday (NZ time) that an agreement could be reached, even if it happened after the official closing of the meetings. Indeed, he was booked to stay throughout the weekend.

Shaw is in Poland at the COP24 talks in Poland, the latest round of the talks which brought the Paris Agreement.

This year, the main goal is creating a ‘‘rulebook’’ that looks at how the ambitious targets set in Paris tackle climate change and how they are actually met and measured by various countries.

This had not happened as of yesterday with about 18 hours of the official programme left but Shaw was confident a rulebook could be hammered out.

‘‘I’m very confident that we’ll have something. And I think broadly speaking we’ll be pretty happy with it – but there will be some things we don’t like,’’ he said.

‘‘Technically it is supposed to close at 6pm tomorrow which is now just about 18 hours away. I think that is probably unlikely – the Paris agreement itself ran about 24 hours overtime. I think this is probably going to go at least that much overtime, because there is a long list of issues to get through, and they are very technical.’’

New Zealand is part of a ‘‘high ambition coalition’’ alongside the European Union and Canada that are generally pushing for a more fulsome approach to climate change.

Shaw said one of the big difficulties was the ‘‘different levels of concern’’ between the countries that saw climate change action as a possible threat to economic growth and those that saw it as an existential necessity. ‘‘Some countries are like: oops, you know, we’re sort of worried about a couple of points of gross domestic product, more than we’re worried about your continued existence.

‘‘On one side you’ve got countries who are saying that they want a set of rules that are quite permissive and lets them do things, because they’re worried about the potential impact on their gross domestic product.

‘‘On the other hand, you’ve got a group of countries who are saying: this is an existential question for us, and our very survival as a culture and as a people is at stake.’’

He compared the different groupings as similar to political parties – a way to negotiate with 10 different viewpoints rather than 200.

GETTY IMAGES A Greenpeace organised march for the political and economic reforms needed to combat climate change during the 24th summit of the United Nations on Climate Change in Katowice, Poland.